The
Institute was the lead plaintiff in a case against the U.S. Department
of the Interior (DOI) and the National Park Service (NPS). The
case was meant to test whether those agencies violated public trust
doctrine, common sense, and their responsibilities of stewardship
in Yellowstone National Park by making agreements with
private corporations to access and commercialize the biodiversity
of that national park. The Institute won part of its case:
in 1999, DOI was required to do an environmental assessment of proposed
benefits-sharing policies in the National Park System. In 2006,
the Department of Interior issued a draft environmental impact
statement on the topic. Public comment was invited. Three years later,
NPS replied to the thousands of comments it had received. In late 2009,
the agency issued a Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) and the
public - after almost a decade of waiting - had the opportunity to
judge whether its concerns had been addressed. The Institute, together
with other groups, shared its continuing concerns in a press release
and a long letter to Jon Jarvis, head of NPS.

If you wish to be informed of new developments related to benefits
sharing, send your email address to <beb@igc.org> and put
“New Benefits Sharing Details” in the subject line of your email.

Please note that this website does not include all the details of all
the aspects of the Yellowstone case. Much of the legal struggle
has involved litigation over the freedom of information and the
Institute’s fight to discover what exactly was happening in the
national parks.

For information on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), see the
FOIAdvocates website, http://www.foiadvocates.com/intro.html . That
site is a project of two attorneys, one of whom - Daniel Stotter - is
the FOIA advocate for the Edmonds Institute’s Yellowstone case.

For further (non-FOIA) details on the Yellowstone case, follow the
links below:

National Park Service
Issues Draft EIS for Comment, 09/26/2006
After many years, the National Park Service begins compliance with the
decision in Edmonds Institute, et al v. Babbit by releasing its
Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the use of
benefits-sharing agreements throughout the entire National Park System.
Comments on the Draft were accepted through January 29, 2007.

The
Yellowstone case has been covered by the New York Times, the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, the Washington Post, Nature, Nature
Biotechnology, Science, Associated Press, United Press
International, ABC News, CNN, NPR and a host of other national,
regional, and local newspapers, magazines, and media outlets.